Category: people

George David has quit as president of the board of Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum. “He is one of the corporate world’s top executives [CEO of United Technologies], running a business that has thousands of employees, tens of billions of dollars in assets and a global reach of staggering proportions. In short, David is a master of his universe who took a personal interest in a state arts treasure, wanting it to grow in profound ways, to be a major player in the world art arena. He put his money – and his company’s money – behind that vision. But David didn’t feel he had the unanimous support of the Atheneum board he led for the last four years, a leadership position that was seemingly his for as long as he wanted it…”

JK Rowling is famously protective of her privacy. But when the mother of a little girl dying of cancer wrote to the author telling Rowling of her daughter’s love of Harry Potter, Rowling contected the girl and struck up a friendship, even revealing details of her next book to the girl before she died.

JK Rowling was the UK’s highest-earning woman in 2002, earning £48 million “through the phenomenal success of her creation in book sales and the subsequent cinema box office hits.” That’s about six times more than Queen Elizabeth.

It’s been eight months since actor Henry Goodman wqas fired after taking over Nathan Lane’s role in “The Producers.” “One minute, I was in the shower singing, thinking, `I just played to 60,000 people in a month, nobody’s asked for their money back, this thing is cooking. I knew I was different from Nathan, but I didn’t know difference was a sackable offense.” Now, after months of soul-searching, he’s back on Broadway in a big way…

“John Crosby, who died Dec. 15 at age 76, after a brief illness, was one of the great visionaries of American opera. Back in the 1950s he imagined a summer opera festival in what struck plenty of people as the very last place on Earth. He borrowed money from his father, a New York lawyer, to buy a 76-acre ranch on a hilltop just north of Santa Fe, N.M. And in July 1957, in a primitive hillside amphitheater, he inaugurated Santa Fe Opera by conducting ‘Madama Butterfly’.”

More than a month has gone by since Canadian author Rohinton Mistry cancelled the remainder of his U.S. book tour after being repeatedly singled out for “security searches” at American airports. In the U.S., it didn’t cause much of a stir, but in Canada, there was national outrage at the lengths to which the U.S. appears to be going to enhance “national security.” Now, a San Francisco bookstore which had scheduled a Mistry reading has gone ahead with the event, with local authors reading from Mistry’s work, in an effort to bring more attention to the author’s protest.

“Featuring personal effects and props belonging to Maria Callas, Athens Tuesday opened a museum dedicated to the New York-born opera legend, the first of its kind in the country… Although she took Greek citizenship only in 1966, aged 43, her enormous global success and heart-rending interpretations of tragic roles, combined with her liaison with the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis — another Greek success story — have made Callas a symbol of Greek national pride.”

“As with so many of his generation, Franzen is conflicted about conflict. Arguing is what grownups do when they are mad (Mommy, Daddy, don’t fight); and swagger doesn’t play well on the current scene, which has partly converted into a Generation X recovery ward for the depressed, medicated, and formerly addicted children of divorce. He is not a masochist, he is a shrewd passive-aggressive (aren’t they all?), courting sympathy by constantly telling us where he hurts and fastening reader interest on himself, regardless of the issue or controversy…”

John Crosby, the musical entrepreneur who “founded the Santa Fe Opera in 1957 and built it into one of the country’s most important opera companies during his 44 seasons as its general director,” died Sunday. “At a time when there were few summer music festivals in the United States, he started a summer opera series that, although far from the urban centers where classical music flourished, quickly drew audiences from around the world.”

Alberto Vilar, the world’s most famous arts patron over the past few years, but under criticism for not living up to some of his pledges, says “he can easily give away $50-million a year”, and “is on record as saying he is good for his pledges. Some of his Amerindo funds have suffered in the depressed stock market. He has also been in poor health. In his interview with this paper, he says he has had four surgeries in the past two years for herniated discs in his lower back. ‘I was at home for one year immobilized,’ he says.